Channel Saturation and the Law of Shitty Click-Throughs

Definition

Channel saturation describes the inevitable decay of marketing effectiveness over time. As a traction channel or strategy becomes popular, competition increases, costs rise, and responsiveness drops. Andrew Chen's "Law of Shitty Click-Throughs" names this formally: over time, all marketing channels result in declining response rates. Banner ads once achieved 75% click-through rates; today they're near-invisible. The law is not that channels stop working, but that their effectiveness compresses as the market adjusts.

In the Book

Weinberg encountered this directly with DuckDuckGo. He initially ranked #1 for "new search engine" using SEO, but the channel "hit saturation pretty quickly" and never moved the needle. The insight was that "often what works in one growth stage eventually stops working" as the company scales and channels fill with competitors.

Chen's formulation: "What this means is that over time, all marketing channels become saturated. As more companies discover an effective strategy, it becomes crowded and expensive or ignored by consumers, thus becoming much less effective." The book uses the Zynga example: Facebook advertising was devastatingly effective when Zynga dominated early, but within a few years the same channel became "basically impossible to leverage the way Zynga did."

The implication is not to give up on a channel but to recognize the ceiling. Tactics that worked for six months stop working. This is not failure; it is the natural lifecycle of any asymmetric advantage. The solution is continuous brainstorming and small-scale testing of new channel strategies and novel platforms before they, too, become crowded.

Why It Matters

Channel saturation reveals that competitive advantage in distribution is temporary. This shifts strategy from finding the one perfect channel to building an organizational capability for continuous channel discovery. It also explains why "what worked last year" becomes insufficient—the moving target requires active adaptation. For scaling organizations, this concept prevents the trap of optimizing yesterday's channel while competitors move to tomorrow's.